Mocca Gallery

Space – The Final Frontier.

This is an experimental piece. I am interested in finding new ways to communicate ideas and information over the Internet. The interactive nature of the web is providing fresh opportunities.

So I created this webpage containing a poem I wrote about space. About the Void. It was inspired by a quotation by Andy Warhol. The webpage looks simple and uncomplicated, but it contains many subtle details designed to communicate these ideas more clearly.

First, there were the traditional choices about line spacing, punctuation, spelling, and capitalizations. But on a webpage, I also have complete control over fonts, font sizes and colors. And then there were the hyperlinks – words that when clicked, bring more information into view. These were designed to be unobtrusive, to provide emphasis, not to interfere with the flow of the poem, yet visible enough to be functional.

When these keywords are clicked, their definitions appear on the page in traditional Merriam-Webster dictionary style. I love these online dictionaries, where definitions of words contain other words that can be clicked, and defined, in a sort of endless loop. Dictionary formats are very sophisticated in their use of font faces, font sizes, font bolds, underlines and italics, punctuation, lists, parentheses, braces and brackets. And every subtle choice is designed to convey meaning.

I modified all this to help me express my thoughts more precisely. I carefully chose which words to provide definitions for. In these definitions I included entries that matched what I was going for, and excluded entries that were off the mark. I used foreground and background colors to highlight phrases that most closely matched my intentions. I attempted to convey exactly what I meant with each word within the context of the poem, rather than defining the meaning of the word in a more general, larger context.

I personally got a lot out of this exercise. I discovered that many of the secondary dictionary definitions gave me a deeper understanding of the concepts these words were attempting to represent. Including a word’s etymology was often enlightening. Knowing that the word ‘time’ was derived from an earlier word meaning ‘tide’ is very interesting. The choices made for synonyms or ‘see also’ were intriguing. For example, linking the word ‘fear’ to the word ‘experience’ has some interesting implications.

I make a living building websites. Everything I do is restricted by commercial considerations.

Sometimes I feel the need to create things without restrictions, where the only considerations are: Do I like it? Is it interesting?

I want to deprogram myself. I want to unlearn the engrained behavior of always asking myself: Will other people like it? Is it useful? Can you make money with it?

So that’s what I’ve been doing in my spare time. Working on things just for the fun of it. And when a work is complete, it’s time to set it aside and move on to the next one. But what do you do the old pieces? That is a real problem.

Sometimes I think these things are like Zen Buddhist sand paintings which should be ritualistically destroyed after completion. But the idea of discarding them doesn’t feel quite right. They seem to have taken on a life of their own somehow.

The collage artist Ray Johnson solved this problem by mailing his work to other people. He would just put it out there. What became of it after that was no longer his concern. Recipients could keep them, destroy them, or pass them on. I think this was an elegant solution.

This website is my solution. It is a gallery where these things can live. Once I put something out there, it is no longer my concern. It is now available to anyone who stumbles across it. If anyone finds it interesting or useful, that’s great. I think this imagery of online messages in a bottle is very romantic.

For several days I had been stewing about all the things I wanted to do, but didn’t have time for. Last night I woke up at 3 am and a thought came to me – think about the time you have, not the time you don’t have.

So it occurred to me:

• I have time to visit sweet Betty
• I have time for a great dinner and a swim
• I have time to vacation in New York
• I have time to meditate every day
• I have time to hug my beautiful wife everyday
• I have time to rub kitty cat bellies every day
• I have time to go out with friends any night
• I have time to call and talk to my Mom
• I have time for yoga and walks

I guess I have all the time I need.

I am reminded of a story in the Gospel of Thomas. Someone asks Jesus where heaven is, and he replies “heaven is spread out upon the earth, but men see it not.”

You are thinking about words you are reading on a webpage I designed to display words that express thoughts I was thinking about a photograph that was taken of a sculpture that was sitting in a sculpture garden in an outdoor gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in March of 2007.

At first I didn’t see the drawings on the surface. Then, when I did see them, I assumed they were made by the artist using paints that matched the color of the metal, as to be visible only when viewed at certain angles according to the light. How clever, I thought.

Then I realized, the surfaces were blank, but it was dusty and people were drawing in the dust with their fingers. It occurred to me that new layers were always accumulating, and the dust images were constantly changing. For some reason, I really liked this idea of a dynamic layer of anonymous art on top of a fixed layer of old famous art.

Moticos – a fully realized nothing containing accidental meaning.

I felt compelled to make this piece after being exposed to several new ideas in quick succession.

While exploring the blogging phenomenon, which was all new to me, I discovered the power of cascading style sheets (CSS). I was especially interesting in using style sheets to control the background images of elements, rather than using the traditional method of inserting images directly as content.

On my new job I was exposed to XML and XML style sheet transformations (XSLT) as a technique to convert basic data elements into content for the web. I immediately saw that combining XSLT with CSS would be an elegant way to convert raw data into something beautiful on the screen.

At the same time I was playing around with Zaadz, a social networking website. Zaadz had pages where members listed books they owned. These lists were communicated by displaying book cover images. These web pages of colorful images, of identical dimensions, were beautiful. And meaningful. Seeing books by the Dalai Lama next to books by Thoreau had implications about the owner. I thought the next logical step was to do the same thing for movies that the member enjoyed.

Everything came together when I saw How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary about collage artist Ray Johnson. I would make a collage of books covers, movie posters, and quotes I thought were interesting. Instead of canvas and paint, I would use programming and digital images, a medium I am more comfortable with. The name “Moticos” is a tribute to Ray.

Then I took it one step further by making it interactive. As you move the mouse over the collage, related image components rise to the top. This allows you to see how it was constructed, which I thought was interesting. Since I was exposing the construction technique, I thought I might as well add a layer for the actual code itself. Well designed code is a beautiful thing to me. Even if you step back where you can’t read the actual lines, I still see a certain elegance in it.

Finally, I realized this collection of things I liked, was actually a self portrait of sorts. So, I added a self portrait image layer from a photograph I had taken of myself a few years earlier.